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Question from Larry: I was digging through some junk in my basement and found my old 1990s era Gateway computer with Windows 3.1 on it.
Just out of curiosity I hooked it up and was surprised to see it come on and boot up.
I spent several minutes just fooling around with it and I noticed how fast it was running.
I have a four month old Dell laptop that has an Intel i5 CPU and 8GB of RAM but it seems to run a lot slower than that 20+ year old Gateway.
Why would a modern computer with supposedly much better hardware run slower than a PC that’s over 20 years old? You’d think today’s hardware would be a lot faster than those older machines. Why aren’t they?
The reason I’m asking this is because my wife is looking to buy her first computer and I’m wondering if she might be better off buying an older used machine since the new ones are so slow.
Rick’s answer: Larry, your “ancient” Gateway desktop machine isn’t really running faster than your new Dell laptop. Truth be told, it’s running slower – a LOT slower.
In fact, the hardware in your Dell likely runs like a Formula 1 race car compared to that “Flintstones era” Gateway.
Modern CPUs and other modern internal computer components run at much faster clock speeds than their predecessors.
What’s more, they have larger address and data buses, plus multiple processor cores and boatloads of RAM that allow the hardware to run the software that’s on them a LOT faster than older machines.
Truth be told, it’s actually the software running on modern computers that makes them appear to run slow.
Take the Windows operating system for example. Some editions of Windows 11 contain up to 100 million lines of code, and all that code adds up to several Gigabytes of data for a PC’s CPU and other components to manage, typically with multiple threads of code being executed at one time.
Compare that to the early versions of Windows which only contained around three million lines, with only one thread being executed at any give time.
In short, the amount of code running on one of those early PCs at one time was minuscule compared to what’s running on even the leanest Windows 11 machine. And that’s before we even load any programs into a modern PC’s RAM!
And speaking of loading programs, those early Windows machines rarely had more than two or three programs loaded into RAM at any given time.
What’s more, the CPU took turns executing those programs one at a time since multi-threading wasn’t supported by either Windows 3.1 or the CPUs that were used in the PCs of that era.
Today’s PCs typically have a dozen or more programs running at all times, each of which is probably several orders of magnitude larger than the largest Windows 3.1 program ever written.
Bottom line: While it definitely seems that today’s computers run slower than many of their ancient counterparts, that’s simply a perception instead of reality.
If you were to try to load even one modern Windows program onto an old Windows 3.1 PC (assuming the hardware could even run it, which it couldn’t), it would choke the machine and bring it right to its knees.
On the other hand, if you were to install DOS and Windows 3.1 on your new Dell laptop and run the largest program you ever ran one your old Gateway, everything would run lightning fast. In fact, those programs would likely finish their tasks so quickly that it would be virtually instantaneous.
I hope this helps, Larry. Thanks for the great question!
Bonus tip: You mentioned above that your wife is looking to buy her first computer. This post has a few tips for choosing a good one.